A History of China | Page 9

is called
the Lung-shan culture, from the scene of the principal discoveries.
Lung-shan is in the province of Shantung, near Chinan-fu. This culture,
discovered only about twenty-five years ago, is distinguished by a
black pottery of exceptionally fine quality and by a similar absence of
metal. The pottery has a polished appearance on the exterior; it is never
painted, and mostly without decoration; at most it may have incised
geometrical patterns. The forms of the vessels are the same as have
remained typical of Chinese pottery, and of Far Eastern pottery in
general. To that extent the Lung-shan culture may be described as one

of the direct predecessors of the later Chinese civilization.
As in the West, we find in Lung-shan much grey pottery out of which
vessels for everyday use were produced. This simple corded or matted
ware seems to be in connection with Tunguse people who lived in the
north-east. The people of the Lung-shan culture lived on mounds
produced by repeated building on the ruins of earlier settlements, as did
the inhabitants of the "Tells" in the Near East. They were therefore a
long-settled population of agriculturists. Their houses were of mud, and
their villages were surrounded with mud walls. There are signs that
their society was stratified. So far as is known at present, this culture
was spread over the present provinces of Shantung, Kiangsu, Chekiang,
and Anhui, and some specimens of its pottery went as far as Honan and
Shansi, into the region of the painted pottery. This culture lasted in the
east until about 1600 B.C., with clear evidence of rather longer duration
only in the south. As black pottery of a similar character occurs also in
the Near East, some authors believe that it has been introduced into the
Far East by another migration (Pontic migration) following that
migration which supposedly brought the painted pottery. This theory
has not been generally accepted because of the fact that typical black
pottery is limited to the plains of East China; if it had been brought in
from the West, we should expect to find it in considerable amounts also
in West China. Ordinary black pottery can be simply the result of a
special temperature in the pottery kiln; such pottery can be found
almost everywhere. The typical thin, fine black pottery of Lung-shan,
however, is in the Far East an eastern element, and migrants would
have had to pass through the area of the painted pottery people without
leaving many traces and without pushing their predecessors to the East.
On the basis of our present knowledge we assume that the peoples of
the Lung-shan culture were probably of Tai and Yao stocks together
with some Tunguses.
Recently, a culture of mound-dwellers in Eastern China has been
discovered, and a southern Chinese culture of people with impressed or
stamped pottery. This latter seems to be connected with the Yüeh tribes.
As yet, no further details are known.

8 The first petty States in Shansi At the time in which, according to
archaeological research, the painted pottery flourished in West China,
Chinese historical tradition has it that the semi-historical rulers, Yao
and Shun, and the first official dynasty, the Hsia dynasty ruled over
parts of China with a centre in southern Shansi. While we dismiss as
political myths the Confucianist stories representing Yao and Shun as
models of virtuous rulers, it may be that a small state existed in
south-western Shansi under a chieftain Yao, and farther to the east
another small state under a chieftain Shun, and that these states warred
against each other until Yao's state was destroyed. These first small
states may have existed around 2000 B.C.
On the cultural scene we first find an important element of progress:
bronze, in traces in the middle layers of the Yang-shao culture, about
1800 B.C.; that element had become very widespread by 1400 B.C.
The forms of the oldest weapons and their ornamentation show
similarities with weapons from Siberia; and both mythology and other
indications suggest that the bronze came into China from the north and
was not produced in China proper. Thus, from the present state of our
knowledge, it seems most correct to say that the bronze was brought to
the Far East through the agency of peoples living north of China, such
as the Turkish tribes who in historical times were China's northern
neighbours (or perhaps only individual families or clans, the so-called
smith families with whom we meet later in Turkish tradition), reaching
the Chinese either through these people themselves or through the
further agency of Mongols. At first the forms of the weapons were left
unaltered. The bronze vessels, however, which made their appearance
about 1450 B.C. are entirely different from anything produced in other
parts of Asia; their ornamentation shows, on the